The Dallas Observer did a nice job last week dissecting the alternatives employed by the four local television stations after the Dallas Police Department released the dashboard video of a patrol officer driving into a 10-year-old boy on a bike. The boy died.
The officer was responding to a call about 7:30 p.m. It was dark. He was traveling about 70 mph without lights and sirens down a four-lane road, where the speed limit is 40 mph. Each of the four TV stations uses different editing tools in displaying the video. Two show the impact:
- KDFW shows the collision and cuts away just after the officer turns his car around.
- KTVT slows down the video as the boy comes into view but cuts away right before impact and picks up again as the officer inspects the scene.
- WFAA relies on stills of the boy on the bike but shows video beforehand.
- KXAS cuts away just after the impact and later shows video of the officer at the site of the wreck.
This is a great case study. None of the four approaches involves ignoring the video or sheltering the audience from difficult content. The anchors or reporters warn viewers of the “graphic nature” of the video.
But after looking at all four, I was struck by how not-graphic the video actually is. You don’t see the boy come off the bike. You don’t see his body in the road. You don’t hear anything. It’s stunning because you see how quickly everything happened. Within two seconds, the boy comes into view and the car shakes ever so slightly as the driver-side bumper smacks the bike. In another powerful moment, you see the officer discover the boy on the shoulder of the road.
After viewing all four treatments and reading the Dallas Morning News article, I’d like to argue for running the entire video online, an option no one chose. I realize that in the context of the evening news, the video is too long and needs other information. But online, as a supplement to a story, it’s the best form of truth-telling. You see how impossible it would have been to avoid the child at that speed, how the child never saw the police cruiser approaching until a half-second before it hit him, how destroyed the officer is. You wonder why such accidents don’t happen more often.
Upon releasing the video, the Dallas Police Department announced a change in its response policy. Officers will not be allowed to speed without lights and sirens. And even then, they will be restricted to 20 miles over the limit.
The police chief said in a press conference that if he could have kept the video from the public, he would have, to protect the family of the boy. But open records laws required that he release the video, along with the investigation report. There’s no doubt that having the public view their boy’s death is harmful to the family. And journalists are obligated to minimize that harm by not using the video in a gratuitous manner, such as a tease or a promo or in B-roll sometime in the future. However, as journalists, we have to side with holding the powerful accountable. And there’s no better way to do that, in this case, than showing the video.
Seeing this video makes it clear that the policies that permitted the officer to speed without lights and sirens are at fault, not the officer himself. I wonder if the chief would have changed the policy so quickly if the video remained hidden from the public?
